Sunday, May 12, 2013

Mechanic Decor: Wheels and Tires as End Tables

When I discovered that the wheels and tires on my Mazda Miata were bent (according to the shop, "bent all to hell"), I also happened to have very little furniture. Conveniently enough, the tires on those wheels were also almost completely worn out. There was no value left in a set of bent wheels with worn tires.

So I looked on Craigslist for glass discs to use as a tabletop. I found someone selling them for $5 apiece. I bought two, stacked the tires two high, and made night stands for our bedroom. My fiancee approves.

Not long after, I found one of my racer friends had a lot of tires left over from a team he worked with. He worked as a mechanic for one of the teams running the Grand-Am Continental Tire series. That team ran the Rolex 24 At Daytona race, which necessarily means a lot of worn-out racing slicks. He hooked me up with four of them for free. He had been keeping them in the hopes of selling them as take-offs that could still be used for shorter events by other racers, but had no takers, so the 20-some tires in his possession were just taking up space at his house.

If you put a set of string lights inside the tires, it'll glow from the inside.